Who Lives Here?

Science

1.     Research an animal home for an animal that lives in the environment surrounding your school and create a diorama of the home.  You may want to take digital pictures of the dioramas so they can be shared online.

2.     Extend the food chain created for the project into a food web and create an image of the food web.

3.     Find seeds for plants that grow in your school environment and plant them in containers.  Do an investigation on what the plants need to survive and grow.  Record and share your results.

4.     Research how insects in your school environment affect the plants growing there.  For example, how do aphids or ladybugs damage or help the plants. Create a poster showing your results.  You may want to take digital pictures of different stages of growth to share online.

5.     Make a bird feeder for the birds in your school environment and describe how this human influence in your environment may help or hinder the participants of this food chain/food web.  Take digital pictures of your bird feeders to share online.

Writing

1.     Choose a habitat that is different from the one surrounding your school and describe what would happen to the animals in your habitat if they lived there.  For example, what would happen to your animals in a desert.

2.     Choose an animal from your school environment and write a story that relates to the food chain the animal is a part of.  Examples: what happens when a new predator enters the food chain, what happens when the major food source in the food chain disappears, a natural disaster destroys all or part of the habitat, or humans decide to build houses in your habitat.

3.     Create a Venn Diagram of the animals and plants in your school environment with the environment from another school.  Write a compare and contrast paragraph or essay using the Venn Diagram.

4.     Create a nature guide of the plants and animals in your school environment.  Include any animals or plants that may be part of your school environment during seasons that are different from when you created the class list.

5.     Create a blog post about the role of the sun in a food chain/food web for students to respond to or have students create their own post in their student blogs.  If you do not have a blog and students do not have blogs.  A blog post will be added to http://mrstravis.edublogs.org at a date to be announced later.

Math

1.     Find the area and perimeter of a flower bed in your school environment.

2.     Estimate the height of a tree in your school environment.  Then create a plan you could use to check your estimate.

3.     Create a graph of the results from all the class lists.

4.     Create story problems relating to food chains/food webs.  For example:  There are 4 oak trees in the school yard.  An oak tree drops an average of 50 seeds each fall.  If all 4 oak trees drop the average amount of seeds for two years, how many seeds will be dropped?

5.     Create repeating and growing patterns of the flowers growing in your school environment.  Explain the core and/or rule of each pattern.

6.     Assign a money value to each item on your class list and determine how much your school environment is worth.  Write the amount as a decimal in standard form, word name, expanded notation, and its fraction equivalent. 

7.     Add an image of your school and the animals and plants found in the environment to graph paper and assign coordinates to each animal and plant.